1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to telephone services and more particularly relates to web-based telephone services.
2. Description of the Related Art
Recent years have witnessed an explosion of developments in both voice and data networking. Sophisticated phone systems used in call centers provide such services as call monitoring and recording, playing pre-recorded messages, call transfer, conference calling, interactive voice response (IVR) programs, and retrieving customer data from a database. At the same time, web-based programs have become increasingly sophisticated, enabling users to use web-based replacements for many of the applications formerly installed on individual workstations, such as word processing, spreadsheets, and databases.
Development of web-based control of telephone services has lagged that of other application areas, due to the difficulty of managing the amount of state information associated with telephone calls via virtually stateless web pages. Cookies are widely used in such applications as ecommerce shopping baskets to make a web site stateful, but the amount of data that can be managed via cookies is limited. In addition, many users set their web browsers to refuse cookies, due to abuse of cookies by spyware.